For example, how do you – as a copywriter – have ideas? Which button do you press? Which crank must you yank? Is it like extracting a can of Lilt from a vending machine – press A, then press 8, then wait for it to clang, slightly dented and severely over-fizzed, into the shadowy trough of your imagination?

The answer is, none of these things. Yes, we may well have certain habits and methods that, more often than not, have borne at least a little edible fruit, but even our most reliable creative methodology is fundamentally characterised by its unreliability.

I have thought, spoken and written about the (awful word) ‘ideation’ process in copywriting to all sorts of audiences – experienced writers who are laden with imagination and achievements, aspiring young creatives who radiate fresh thinking the way many of their contemporaries radiate a haze of Lynx Voodoo. In each case there have always been two things that remained unfalteringly true – they were here for answers, and I had no such thing to give.

The fact is that trying to teach someone how to have an idea is like teaching them how to metabolise complex starch. It’s a process that, to a large extent, is out of our hands. But, I am nothing if not a trier – my persistence being reserved solely for esoteric matters like this and not something practical and attainable like, say, my gym membership – and so let me try to put into clumsy words the four conditions I believe no brainstorm can be without.

1. Blessed are the contributors

Here are a few of Tina Fey’s rules of improvisation, as set out in her excellent memoir ‘Bossy Pants’:

“The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, ‘freeze, I have a gun’ and you say ‘that’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me’ our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, ‘freeze, I have a gun’ and you say ‘the gun I gave you for Christmas! you bastard!’ then we have started the scene because we have agreed that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun!”

The parallels between improvisational comedy and the dynamic between brainstorming creatives are as pronounced as they are intimidating. As one of those creative professions that resides in the borderlands between extroversion and a pathological love of solitude, copywriting isn’t necessarily awash with people with the capacity, or inclination, to borrow from the most high-wire branch of the performing arts.

And yet, many of the core principles in improvisation feel especially appropriate to any sort of creative collaboration where the aim is to build something together. ‘Build’ is the operative, and often forgotten word, and there can’t be many of us who haven’t found ourselves trapped in a brainstorm with a person, or persons, determined to demolish. Perhaps you have, on occasion, been that person, but I’ll understand if you don’t want to admit to it here.

The rule of agreement, as opposed to objection, is, as all these things are, imperfect. What value is there in nodding dumbly along to an idea that, even with the greatest encouragement, is destined to never out-grow its inherent dullness. No, uncritical, unquestioning agreement is not the trick we’re looking for, but the idea of contribution is. The Fey rule is not about agreeing for the sake of it, but rather using someone else’s contribution as a springboard for your own. Sometimes that might require a contribution that diverts, very deliberately, from the previous person’s suggestion – but at least there is a thread between their thought and yours.

There is no crime in not liking, or rather not believing in, an idea – but to dismiss it without a new suggestion or direction makes you dead, damp, desolate weight in a room that’s already too vulnerable to carry something so burdensome as a brick wall. As Fey says, “it’s your responsibility to contribute” – and while this won’t always assume the form of cheery toddlers attaching their Lego robots together to form a communal mega-robot, assuming the attitude that everyone is there to share and not shackle, will at least reduce the chances of the meeting ending in unretractable curses, blows or throttlings.

2. The room is not real

Again, I find that the only person I trust to properly guide a copywriter in a brainstorm is a person who has never been a copywriter in a brainstorm.

A very long time ago I scribbled down this passage from Steve Martin’s memoir ‘Born Standing Up.’ I noted it down, as I tend to do, with an idea that it was telling me something useful, but with no real notion of what. It goes like this:

“I believed it was important to be funny now, while the audience was watching, but it was also important to be funny later, when the audience was home and thinking about it. I didn’t worry if a bit got no response, as long as I believed it had enough strangeness to linger.”

In the context of this ill-advised brainstorm exploration (that I’m really rather starting to regret) this thought from Martin makes me think about the unhelpful unreality of ‘the room’.

After all, it would hard to manufacture more artificial conditions for creative productivity – not least because enclosed spaces are poor enough for idea generation with a single creative, let alone a brood of them.

Even if the generation of ideas doesn’t suffer too badly from the conditions, the evaluation of those ideas most certainly will. Simply put, we make poor judgements in a brainstorm and can become fixated on an idea that, beyond the boundaries of its birthplace, is neither as interesting nor as effective as we feel it is in the moment.

As Martin suggests, the truly valuable ideas are those that can not only remain in-tact beyond the conditions of the brainstorm, but are actually enhanced – gaining in potency and clarity the more we think about them on the outside.

I’m not saying that our creative judgement within the brainstorm is entirely unreliable. The Mel Brooks’ writing-room rule of ‘first, we laugh’ remains solid and sensible – an idea must delight the room first and foremost, otherwise we can surely do better. But that delight must expand and brighten and crystalise over the hours and days after it was first conceived for us to truly know it is worth building upon.

The great failing, then, of the brainstorm is constraint – in terms of both space and time. By setting the expectation that only the hour, or hours, in the room matter, in terms of both concepts and critique, you create a too-trusting, too breezy culture of ‘you gets what you gets’. Treating the brainstorm as the one and only moment for invention – a now-or-never leap of the imagination – then you leave promising ideas undeveloped and weak ideas unexamined.

The natural solution is to regroup some time after the ideas session – a calm after the brainstorm – and allow the alchemic effects of time, distance and reflection to illuminate where the real ark lies. In other words, resist the fabricated allure of the creative sprint.

3. Set a higher stranger bar

What are we all actually doing here – in this room that stinks of cold tea and soul fatigue? What do they – that grim and grasping ‘they’ – want us to do?

In its most basic sense, we are expected to produce ideas – good ones, fresh ones, ones that are tethered unbreachably to the brief we were given. And so we sit around and try to find ideas that are, above all, ‘right’.

Now, even at my most contrarian, I’d struggle to claim that pursuing a ‘right’ idea is a bad thing. What I might suggest, is that what we mean by ‘right’ is steering us down a path that, while diligent and responsible and all such grown-up things, isn’t always that interesting.

The brainstorm, I could argue, is not a place to do the ‘right’ thing, if such an approach will only ever lead you to something that feels flaccid with familiarity. The bar, in fact for the brainstorm, is not to be safe but to be incendiary.

I’ve always enjoyed the line from James Victore’s wonderful book ‘Feck Perfuction’ where he argues that any creative who wants a pony should be asking for a unicorn. It’s a perfect expression of how the overambitious rarely underdeliver, simply because they set their sights not on the doable solution but the improbable one.

The purpose then, in being sequestered in that room, is to produce something unlikely – even when, especially when, the likely answer is nearer at hand. You don’t need to go through something as maddening and tiresome as a brainstorm to come up with the obvious solution, so if you’re putting people through one the least you can do is to take them fully off the leash.

The brainstorm needs rational heads, but maybe not yet, and certainly not all the time. Being able to tug on a peculiar thread without anyone pulling you back to something so bloodless as ‘the point’ is where brainstorms do the real work – and that’s why there is no room for pony trekkers in a group who are supposed to be scouting for unicorns.

4. Bafflement is a gift

The one thing to know about the brainstorm is that nobody knows anything. As I say, certainty is no friend to copywriting, it’s not even a work colleague with whom you have a shared, but conversationally limited, love of motor racing or gluten-free bakery or Line of Duty.

I’ve always taken reassurance from a line Neil Simon wrote for Peter Falk’s hard-boiled, soft-headed detective in ‘Murder By Death’:

‘That can only mean one thing [glorious comic beat] And I don’t know what it is.’

The line, and particularly Falk’s delivery, has never yet failed to make me chuckle, but like all my favourite jokes it expresses a recognisable truth and, I suppose, pain. The creative life, particularly the copywriting branch, expects impossible answers from imperfect questions, and can grind down a fine idea simply because it doesn’t present an acceptable kind of incontestable conviction.

But these gaps in reasoning and rationale shouldn’t be treated as hazards in a brainstorm. Rather, I’d even suggest that the best thing you, or anyone, can offer in a brainstorm is something incomplete, a thought not yet filled out or formed, but tantalisingly abridged.

These unfinished thoughts, this sense of ‘lack’ can energise a room in a way that’s simply not possible when someone presents the solution in its entirety. It is liberating to know how much you don’t know, and when the creatives in a brainstorm pursue the blank spaces they are typically at their best.

In this sense, answers are overrated. They are by their very nature an ending, when the brainstorm is concerned with as many beginnings as we can muster – and to fixate too much on a clear and complete picture will leave you too daunted to chase the most wild-eyed rabbits down the most intriguing holes.

Congratulations, you know exactly as much as you did before

So that is all I have to offer. How meagre it is when you set it down on the page. How inadequate a substitute for an actual solution.

The point, I suppose, of laying this all out only to realise none of us are any better equipped than we were before, is that few things are unhealthier to a copywriter than a ‘formula’. Formulas, however rigorously tested and diligently applied, will let you down. For no reason, and through no fault of the writer, but simply because the formula is a splinter in the big toe of creativity. It doesn’t belong there and, after a while, your imagination’s jealous immune system will push it out.

Perhaps, then, all we can ever really know about effective brainstorming is that we must behave as it does – impulsively, whimsically, unpredictably and with fanatical irrationality. The brainstorm won’t thank you for your attentiveness, and it definitely won’t reward you for something so cheaply bought as ‘effort’. It will behave as it always does – giving a little, taking a lot, and adhering to nobody’s schedule but its own. Our job, the copywriter’s purpose, in all of this is simple – listen, breathe, share and build. Lay in wait for an idea that sucks the air from the room as if a window had suddenly popped out of an airplane. And, when it does, be ready to crack it decisively on the head before it gets away.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

https://gasp.agency/media/copywriting-is

Adele Writes an Ad

https://gasp.agency/media/adele-writes-an-ad

That may sound like a maudlin opener to what, I hope, is a jaunty account of a decidedly happy copywriting week – what I mean by it is simply that I have been on a pitch this week and it has been exhausting, consuming and, above all, wonderful.

Not all pitches are conducive to happiness, and even fewer are designed to leave you with anything other than severely depleted reserves of energy or imagination. But I have to admit that the good pitches I’ve worked on outnumber the bad by ‘A Big Number’ to one.

This week’s was an unusually agreeable set of conditions – like some sort of creative eclipse in which the chance to work on a fun brief, for an exciting client with great pals all improbably aligns in the same job.

It is, of course, lovely to have all three of those conditions in place, but if I only ever signed on for the pitches that ticked every box I wouldn’t have worked on very many. The upside to that would be the chance to regain several hundred hours of my life but, in all honesty, I’d have only squandered them anyway.

If I were left to choose just one of the key components – fun brief, exciting client or great pals – there is no question it would be the latter. I have worked late into the night on some of the dullest briefs for some of the blandest clients you can imagine, yet sharing the experience with fine and funny people more than made up for all the rest. If you have worked for a while in the copywriting and creative life, I’d wager that some of the people you feel most fondly about are ones with whom you’ve shared cold pizza and warm beer in the 16^th hour of a pitch session.

This week’s pitch was spent with mates I have known for years – both of them talented creatives, entertaining company and set to the exact degree of serenity you need to work well in situations where it feels like your desk is sliding into a volcano. Honestly, it’s the kind of job where I’d work for free, if my mortgage provider would only join in the spirit of such a gesture.

My two pals also brought on a couple of outstanding junior teams to join the parade – and seeing young creatives meeting the challenge of a big pitch with humour, focus and some spectacular ideas is a sight that will warm the oldest and coldest of copywriting bones. It should also serve as a rebuke to anyone mean-spirited enough to have abandoned the business of nurturing young creatives in exchange for the grimy faux efficiency of AI. If you’ve done this then you are, despite what you tell yourself, appalling.

Choose your castaway

What always surprises me about a pitch – despite it occurring every time – is how easily seduced your mind is by the sport of it all. On an ordinary day I am good, or at least not terrible, at knowing when to switch off, step away, seek my kicks elsewhere. But with a pitch, I seem to enter a different state of ‘on’ – not consciously trying to ‘get some work done’ but equally incapable of thinking meaningfully about anything else. Another good sign that you are in the right lifeboat with the right castaways, is when your pitch pals are afflicted in a similar way. This past week we have messaged each other at appalling and inconsiderate times – and not because we’re those terrible people who feel like ‘business never sleeps’ (it does, and it snores, and often wets the bed too). Instead we were maintaining this ‘out-of-hours’ contact simply because we were excited to be working on what we were working on, to the point where the thought of waiting til morning to mention a new addition or adjustment to an idea seemed as unappealing as juggling horny roosters.

I should add that there were pitches I didn’t feel this way about – where I did my time, delivered what was asked and never gave it another thought. The thing is that you can’t talk someone into caring about a pitch, or any sort of brief – and I know this because of all the times we were reminded, in my small agency days, how a certain pitch represented financial salvation for the business. We all absolutely tried our best in those moments – partly because having a salary was better than not, partly because we genuinely liked where we worked and wanted them to exist – but even when you’re peeping into the abyss, a pitch either grabs you or it doesn’t.

Just the right amount of banana

I don’t like to analyse too closely why it is I like the things I like – the theory being that understanding and appreciation can, in crucial ways, exist at opposite poles. But, being a brave boy, I did look a little closer at what had lifted my spirits these past few days and I think I have something that may pass as an answer.

There are many gears to copywriting, or any form of ‘jobbing’ creativity. And that means, depending on the sequence in which your work arrives, you could find yourself operating more mechanically than artistically for relatively long stretches. That’s no bad thing – a trained, serious, experienced creative can produce more of a flourish in third gear than the ordinary citizen could muster at full pelt. Not everything requires the full banana. But equally, it is unhealthy to spend too long in a comfortable state, creatively. A pitch, where there are stakes, a prize and, most importantly, competition, forces you to operate at your highest intensity. This is penalty shootout, final throw, last life, all or nothing territory and, for all the best creatives I ever knew, this is where the good stuff happens.

Reflecting on this reminded me of a passage I scribbled down from an essay from 1994 by the author Lorrie Moore. In it, she points out the fundamental difference between being a writer and actually writing:

“Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity – to write, I write, we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.”

This is what a pitch – or least the right pitch of pitch – does to you. It strips away any posturing or complacency and leaves you with nothing but a moment in which your ideas are either good enough or, frankly, you die.

But it would be disingenuous of me to claim that what I like most about a pitch is something so grown-up as reasserting my commitment to the craft. I like how this kind of intensive creative immersion makes me feel about my own creativity. It feels good to have good ideas, and have people you admire validate those ideas in a situation where there’s no time for insincerity or the preservation of one another’s delicate feelings. Perhaps the great short story writer Donald Barthelme puts it best in his story The Genius:

“The work flatters the worker. Only the strongest worker can do this work, the work says. You must be a fine fellow, that you can do this work.”

Gone to pot

There are lots of metaphors that describe the feeling of a creative problem you become lost in – not many of them that accurate or original or even that good. I know this because I’ve used a lot of them. But, seeing as I am no quitter (exclusions apply) I shall have another go to try and make sense of the pitch fever we’ve all caught from time to time.

The best I have is pot-holing. (I have lost some of you already, I can tell.) But specifically I mean pot-holing carried out by people who really shouldn’t be doing it. The sort of pot-holing that would open an episode of Casualty. In other words, ‘bad-idea pot-holing’.

To begin with, it isn’t especially easy to squeeze yourself into the first moments of a pitch. There is an opening, but it feels a little snug, a little daunting, a little crowded with pointy rocks and distant screams. There is a moment where you ask yourself whether you really want to be doing this thing at all, and that moment usually comes the very second after you’ve begun doing it and it’s too late to stop.

And, once you’re inside, there’s no way to go other than onwards. You take wrong turns and have to reverse. You get stuck down a path that you’re sure leads somewhere good and squander precious daylight inching your way along, only to discover that there’s just some Morlock poo at the end. And, crucially, you are led in certain interesting directions by the people you’re down there with. One of you may stumble on promising route, and then everyone else descends to try and figure out what to do with it.

This kind of creative spelunking never stops being hard, or scary or rife with hazards – you just stop noticing all that quite so much. Instead, you start to gather a collective sense that you are getting closer and closer to something that makes all of this squeezing and cursing worth it. You plop out into a chamber that is so deep and so far from where you began, and you realise that this is what you were looking for all along. Getting back out again, of course, is another story but you’re not really interested in that right now.

Perhaps all I’ve done there is pile another flimsy metaphor on top of the teetering pile, but when I read it back I do feel like that’s how my week on this pitch has unfolded – although that might be because I am never without my headtorch and emergency whistle during a pitch.

In the moment, still filled with the giddy light of the past week, I tell myself that I always want it to feel like this. How about I farm myself out as a pitcher for hire – and travel from pitch to pitch like a chicken-legged Incredible Hulk. I certainly think I could do it, and enjoy it, for a while – maybe even forever. But then again, I imagine that some of the world’s most disillusioned people are the ones who got to live their best day, every day. The pitch feeling I feel at the moment only grows dimmer and more distant the more you chase it – and I’m happy to wait here for it to come back when its good and ready. It’s not like I’ve got anywhere else to be.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

If I did have a beat it may be, through no fault of my own, awkward exchanges with the creative job market.

If you don’t already know my tale of woe (by which I mean, mild inconvenience) let me summarise as quickly and uncomplainingly as possible. My first real encounter with joblessness as a copywriter happened a few years ago when the company where I was Head of Copy – a tech firm with about as much emotional intelligence as the bees who murdered Macaulay Culkin in ‘My Girl’ – abruptly canned the entire creative team.

And so I was thrust into a life of involuntary freelance, which actually should have been a lot of fun if I hadn’t become so strange and terrified all the time. So, eager to return to the warm embrace of a job that offered access to one of those futuristic boiling water taps and all the bank holidays I could ever want (seven), I began applying for jobs.

Admittedly, I didn’t do this well. If you’ve ever felt the boot of redundancy in the ample and complacent seat of your corduroy pants (and who among us creatives haven’t) you’ll know that the need to be re-employed often outweighs small matters like reason and dignity.

So, I applied for a lot of copywriting jobs that I desperately did not want to do – and, in an emotionally catastrophic twist of fate, often never got so far as a first interview with most of them. If you’ve ever wanted to gulp down a heady cocktail of anger, shame, bewilderment and relief, then I can highly recommend giving this a go.

Come with me if you want to live

I was then fortunate enough to be rescued, through no sensible choice of my own, by an old pal who had become Head of Creative at a new place and was looking for a senior writer to join him for 12 months. I took it, partly for the joy of working with one of the very best and nicest creative leaders I know, but also partly to save myself from an irresponsible approach to job seeking that was sure to land me in trouble.

After 12 months at that place – having a good time, working with some excellent people, only fretting about the mortgage to an ordinary degree – I voluntarily returned to the job-seeking life, but with a better (and less manic) attitude.

This time, I had lined up some fun freelance projects, had developed a workshop on creative play and had started selling 1-hour calls to anyone who wanted to pick my brains about their creative practice or career. In other words, I had stepped willingly and preparedly into the freelancing life as opposed to last time where it felt more like falling off an open top tour-bus in a part of town solely inhabited by stranglers and raccoons.

But, I still applied for jobs, only this time with a lot more consideration and a lot less stress-indigestion. And, I’ve had some great experiences – including one place who asked me to put together some ideas as part of the interview process and paid me properly to do it. It wasn’t exactly my full hourly rate, but it wasn’t a million miles away and they paid it fully and promptly. I have an awful lot of time for that particular company and the way they handled the entire interview process, not just the bit where they gave me money just so I could try and make them give me a job. I don’t know if they’d want me to trumpet their name all over the place, but if you ever meet me in real life and want to know who they are I’d be happy to tell you. In a world of dirty chicken bums, they are good eggs.

By now I’d realised that putting time and effort (and usually not enough of either) into applying for jobs I’d hate to do was a waste of everyone’s energy. Why it took so long for me to reach such an obvious conclusion is not to be discussed, but I hope it serves as a small window into the lives and burdens of my family.

Instead I picked out the jobs that I knew I would really want to do and applied using something other than panic, bluster and resignation – creativity.

Uncovering letters

As you’ve surely gathered, I’m in no position to offer any creative professional any sort of advice about getting a job. But if you will permit me to say one thing that isn’t entirely futile – you will have far more luck, and gain far more pleasure, from applying for creative jobs in a creative way.

I’m not talking about ‘zany’ stunts like sending a prospective employer a shoebox filled with polaroids of you standing outside (and, somehow, inside) their office. I’m simply talking about using your talents for storytelling and yarn-spinning to talk about your professional skills in a way that shows those skills in action. Choosing more surprising words, leading with more intriguing openings and generally messing with the rules of how an application is supposed to look and sound all makes a difference – providing, of course, that these flourishes are all in service of The Point. Instead of a covering letter I once sent a list of ‘10 Lies You May Have Heard About Andrew Boulton.’ That got me an interview. For another, I sent them ‘My Brutally Honest References’ – a candid list of my weaknesses as a copywriter and a human that, cunningly, were all actually things that made me ideal for the job. Again, it got me an interview.

(A quick aside. You may be wondering why, if I was getting all these interviews, I am not actually performing any of these jobs. The honest answer is I’m not entirely sure, although one or two of them took a decidedly frosty turn when I announced my (admittedly outrageous) salary expectations.)

But I can’t pretend that bringing a creative knife to a recruitment gunfight is really going to even the odds. The recruitment system, even for creative businesses who depend on creative people, is still built around the (often literal) ticking of boxes. We can, and partially should, blame AI for the dehumanisation of what should be an entirely human process. But the reality is that this system isn’t, and has never been, built for people like us.

Questions of incompetency

The most depressing example of this from my wilderness days was an interview with a company I actually really wanted to work with. The role was creative and the expectation for the person who eventually got it was that they would set new creative standards for a business that had perhaps lost its appetite and appreciation for unconventional thinking. This is so far up my street that I’d have to get two buses just to get back home for tea.

But there was a hiccup, and not just because of the stress-indigestion. The interview was something called ‘competency based’. Now, I do know what these things are – my wife, who has a grown-up job often conducts them – but I had never actually had to sit through one for a creative role before.

I perhaps don’t need to tell you that this competency interview did not go well, and it would be fair to say that my opinion of them can largely be contextualised by that. I’m just not sure that it’s the best way to evaluate someone for a creative role, particularly a creative leadership role. The structure of the questions, presumably designed to keep candidates focussed on specific, measurable points, serve as a highly effective personality shackle – keeping you so focussed on a time you did a thing, and why you did that thing, and what things that thing produced, to the point where you stop thinking of yourself as a real person and merely an underwritten character in a small and uninteresting scene. The more of these questions I was asked, and the more I tried to play by the rules, the less excited I got about doing the job. Perhaps this is hopelessly naïve of me, but the feeling you have at the end of an interview may be exhilaration, or despair or even exhaustion, like you’ve just climbed a slippery mountain or kayaked away from a barracuda. What you shouldn’t feel though, is boredom.

I feel sad about that interview because I feel like we’d all forgotten to invite creativity to the meeting. I didn’t get to show what I can do, and maybe that’s my fault for trying to play my part as opposed to simply playing. And, while the formula was followed and the boxes got ticked, I’m not sure any of the people interviewing could really have got much out of something so sparkless and neat.

So, as you can see, this really is my writerly beat of sorts. I never meant it to be, and I certainly wouldn’t want you to follow my advice or be guided by my muddling, stumbling footsteps. This stuff is too hard and too unknowable and too merciless for anyone to offer you any promises about how it will work. But I do believe that creative people doing creative things will always win you something that matters more than the covering letter and the CV and the form that asks you for everything that’s already there in the CV. And that thing is curiosity. That small itch in even the busiest, most indifferent, minds that says: ‘who is this person?’. Better to roll that particular dice and lose than to be just another form without a face, just another candidate without a canvas.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

The point of it all is to read. But not in the way we usually do, hurriedly and distractedly, impatiently piecing together the meaning for ourselves before the author has even shown it to us. But to read with care and, more importantly, curiosity.

In each of Munro’s opening lines we are both given and denied knowledge. There is something in there to arrest us and something to arouse us. In other words, enough is provided to make it seem enticing, and enough is withheld to make it seem irresistible.

For example, there’s this line from the story ‘Face’:

“I am convinced that my father looked at me, stared at me, saw me, only once.”

The throwaway reading of this line is that a person is remembering their neglectful father. But the curious reading notices a little more than that. We notice the word ‘convinced’ which is something we say when we truly believe something… or fervently wish to. And what about the repetition of ‘looked’ and ‘stared’ and ‘saw’ – words that feel like they do the same thing, but are significantly different if we were to experience them in real life. The question we find ourselves asking is what, precisely, causes a father to look once, and only once, at his own child? Is it, as we assumed, indifference, or something far more potent than that? Perhaps, we wonder, one look was all he had the need, or opportunity, to take. Whatever the answer, by reading the line this way we have relieved ourselves of our certainties and that is the greatest motivation for us to read on.

How about this one, from ‘The Progress of Love’:

“I got a call at work, and it was my father.”

As a ‘hook’ it is far shorter and simpler than the opening line to ‘Face’. On the surface, it feels almost mundane, except there is an incongruous arrangement of parts in there that shakes us out of our complacency – the fact that the call is coming at work, from the narrator’s father. This line does the remarkable job of making an entirely truthful statement, while withholding almost all of the truth. We know the narrator was at work. We know they received a call. We know that the call came from their father. And those three pieces of unambiguous information are designed to make us feel as if we don’t know anywhere near enough. Naturally, when we are denied an explanation we try to manufacture our own. For me, the idea of receiving a call at work (calls at home, unless at an unreasonable hour, are always less ominous) from one’s father spells trouble – a medical thing, an accident of some sort, a bad moment that has just arrived or is in the post. But made-up explanations are so unsatisfying because they ultimately explain nothing and so what are we to do except read on, albeit with a new sense of unease.

Ask three questions

Around here I’ll introduce the group to George Saunders’ remarkably useful ‘3 Questions’ for assessing the opening of a story – or, at least, better understanding our reaction to it. In his excellent book on the craft of short story writing, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, Saunders suggests asking ourselves three things by the end of the first page:

1. What do I know so far?

2. What am I curious about?

3. Where do I think this is going?

The same principles can apply to anything we read – even work emails – and is a useful reminder that the most successful kind of communication is the one in which attention is earned rather than assumed.

I shan’t go through any more of Munro’s openers here (feel free to do so yourself though), but I can tell you that it’s fascinating to be in the room as the group starts to open their eyes to what a sentence is really telling you. It’s reassuring to see how quickly curious, creative, playful minds are able to break the habits of skimming and scanning and instead allow themselves to be intrigued. And I like to think that, by the end of this game and the ones that follow, we start to see how, when we read more curiously, we write more convincingly.

Choosing our words

But the point of all this isn’t to invite people to overanalyse every message they write or receive – that will only serve to make us even less present in our communication than we were before. The idea is to think about how the first thing we say sets the tone, and the expectations, for everything that follows. In a copywriting sense this, of course, means the difference between your message being read or abandoned. But in any sort of professional communication, where people treat their email like the soiled litter boxes of an unlikeable cat they’ve somehow agreed to look after, creating interest from the beginning can reward you with the attention of a person who has very little of it to give. In fact, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the people who choose their words most carefully, even craftily, are the ones who are more likely to be listened to.

So while this game is built around a very literary starting point, in the room we go on to consider how these same principles can be found in any kind of writing. For example, here are the opening lines from a review of ‘The Night Porter’ by the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby:

“Let us now consider a piece of junk. Soberly. Without snickering.”

Or this opening to Penelope Lively’s autobiography Ammonites & Leaping Fish: a life in time:

“This is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age.”

Both openings do the job of earning our attention. Both provide us with a sense of direction, but neither excludes us from all that is to follow – we are arrested, we are aroused and we go on with a sense of well-won anticipation.

We could do this all day, and there will have been many days spent in less satisfying ways. Any kind of writing you can imagine, for any kind of audience, offers many examples of what happens when you begin with something that is both stimulating and unexpected. For example, consider the opening line of Lemony Snicket’s ‘The Austere Academy’:

“If you were going to give a gold medal to the least delightful person on Earth, you would have to give that medal to a person named Carmelita Spats, and if you didn’t give it to her, Carmelita Spats was the sort of person who would snatch it from your hands anyway.”

Or, abandoning prose for a moment, how about this opener to Henry Normal’s poem ‘The eating of a unicorn’:

“So I’m eating this unicorn and I’m thinking

this isn’t right

but you’ve got to eat haven’t you?”

The very same principles are what allows certain advertising headlines to overcome our bombarded brains’ instinct to preserve a sense of peace and focus. The headline to this famous Porsche ad,

for example (coupled with precisely the right image)

gives us most of the point, and the joke, from the beginning – but we’re still compelled to complete the story in a way we wouldn’t have been if it had simply led with something like ‘The Fastest Car in Germany’.

There’s this too from American Airlines – an ad that is essentially making the point that everyone receives the same (excellent) service, no matter if you’re a once-a-year vacationing family or a frequently flying singer in the rain. Like the Munro stories, and like any opening that has successfully disarmed your defences, this ad tells you something worth knowing in a way that was worth reading.

Irresistible vs unreadable

Now, I’ll admit, that these fine and honourable principles can occasionally get corrupted in the marketing world – with the overeager often mistaking artless chicanery for intrigue. We’ve all had ‘those’ emails and we invariably think even less of them than the ones that were mercifully, inoffensively dull. The trick to writing seductively – and it’s a trick that’s hard to do and easy to forget – is to make it seem as if you’re not trying to seduce anyone.

I end this little game with a lesson from the great editor and author, Sol Stein, who encourages all writers to ‘season even the most conventional beginning with just enough that is unconventional to rouse the readers.’ And then we go on to play more games that put this into practice, writing less like we need it to be finished, sent, off-our-plate and more like, more than anything, we want it to be read.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

And so, when good things get worse on purpose, we’re left wondering who is to blame. And, when the blame in question relates to a poorly assembled collection of words it’s perhaps understandable – if you’ve never been, or intimately known, a copywriter – to assume the fault must lie with the writer. It’s like encountering a toppled heap of dismembered flat-pack bookshelf parts and then seeing a man in the corner bearing an allen key and teary eyes. The conclusion is not hard to reach.

Except – and do feel free to call me a copywriter apologist, for that’s surely what I am – I don’t think it’s ever been as straightforward as that.

This way of thinking is why I’m so very reluctant to criticise copy I see out in the world, or at least to do it publicly. There is, however, a gloomy suburb of creative LinkedIn devoted to posting sneeringly about a headline that missed the mark, and we seem to be lucky enough to have a roving pack of creative constables forever on duty to point out why this definitely represents the death of all copywriting.

I won’t pretend to understand the rationale behind this sort of thing – although it’s obvious to anyone that publicly tearing down poor work is easy to do when you’ve experienced none of the anguish or madness that led to a bad line becoming quite so bad.

Of course, some poor copy was always poor – particularly now Johnny Robot is on the scene, firing out gloop as undiscerningly as a pelican defecating a batch of bad clams. But there are plenty of lines I see in the wild where you can feel what the copywriter intended, and how it deviated from that.

Now, you can see where this is heading, so before we get there I’m going to try to correct course just a little. We cannot simply blame the deterioration of good copy into (at best) nebulous fuzz, on the client. It’s not fair, it’s not right and, very often it’s not even true.

It takes a copywriter to write a great line, but it takes a whole business to ruin one. Person A has a doubt, then Person B has a suggestion, which we must attach to Person C’s peeve and Person D’s worries and Person E’s erroneous comma and so on. By the end, and with no one person doing any enormous damage, the work is in tatters. The copywriter can see all of this, and probably does their best to guide, soothe, persuade… but ultimately they reach a point where the whole thing needs to be done, and so it’s called done.

But the over-involvement of others in the copywriting process is no new thing, and can’t be held responsible for every disappointing message you encounter. What does feel relatively new, at least in my experience, is a less dramatic, but maybe more harmful, trend in the ‘refinement’ stage of writing copy.

What I tend to find, perhaps more than I did before, is a belief among brands and businesses in the existence of an ‘Attention Span’. I’m sure people can talk with great authority and evidence about the human capacity for attention in such an oppressively online world – so I should say here that I am not one of these people.

My view on the Attention Span is that, if such a thing exists, it’s a poorly drawn character. What I mean is that I struggle to believe in any truth or ‘formula’ that determines what the Attention Span is prepared to tolerate. It’s like saying you’ve written a joke that absolutely every human being on the planet will laugh at in the right way, for the right duration and with a predictable percussive arrangement of knee slapping.

The brain, and how it chooses to consume the world around it, seems an unlikely candidate for convenient truths. If you say to me that people are too busy to read more than, say, eight words, then I wonder why so many emails, so many conversations, so many stories, so many poems and songs seem to be so much longer than that. ‘But wait’ you say, ‘you’re talking about things that people either have to do, or choose to do, and your stupid advert is neither.’ And you’d be quite correct to say that, although I must say I don’t care for your tone.

But how about this for a theory – adverts, marketing messages of all sorts, may never be something you’re required to engage with but, for many, many years – when done well – they’ve been something people will choose to read, re-read and even tell their friends to read. Something bright, and funny and interesting will win the author at least a lingering glance, even when it ends in a sales pitch for a new and deadlier weedkiller.

And this is why I have so much disdain for the ‘rules’ around what the attention span will and will not permit. The length of the line is, within reason, almost irrelevant providing it contains that essential, indefinable grain of curiosity. In fact, I’d even go so far as to suggest that it’s the slightly longer lines that do a better and bolder job of catching our eye and tickling our imagination.

Take, for example, this – perhaps my favourite headline of all time (written by Dennis O’Reilly for DDB).

Now, through the lens of all our ‘certainties’ around terribly busy people who are marching, scrolling, ploughing unwaveringly on, on and ever on in life, you may be asked to make this line ‘tighter’ or ‘punchier’. And you’d probably try, and you’d probably ruin it because, I’d say, that 16 words is the precise number of words this line requires in order to be brilliant. And how, we are entitled to ask, does one make something shorter when it’s exactly as long as it needs to be?

The answer to that is depressing, and perhaps revealing of why so many lines seem to be shadows of what they were supposed to be. When faced with a lovely, amusing, memorable 16 words, we’re often asked if we can remove 3 or 4 or 8 of those words without ‘altering’ the spirit of the line, which everybody loves by the way.

This is, of course, clearly not possible, particularly when you’ve spent a good portion of your life working out precisely what a sentence needs to breathe. (If you haven’t done this by the way, then there’s a good chance your line is full of ballast and, like the poor backpack, you should simply shut up and start cutting.) But to others, they may look at a word here and there and near the end and various other places, and decide that they don’t ‘do anything’. But the trouble is, they do. Those words may not mention the brand name, or deliver a benefit, or even independently arrest a hurrying commuter – but they are there in service of the story.

I scribbled down this splendid quote from David Lodge’s book on writing called The Art of Fiction, where he says: “The simplest way of telling a story is in the voice of a storyteller”. What we are stripping out from these evocative lines is the voice of the storyteller. We take away the parts that make it a story and leave behind only the parts that make it ‘content’ and no writing can survive such a loss and still remain worth reading for a moment.

There is of course a single word that can help, if not to solve this, then at least make it a fairer fight. The word is ‘Why?’.

Why… do you believe that people won’t read something purely because of its length?

Why… do you believe that the size of the message is worth greater consideration than the quality?

Why… would you think that 8 bland words will do us more good than 16 perfectly arranged ones?

In other words, why have we bought into this ‘system’ – these careless, chinless acts of narrative vandalism – that seems so incompatible with everything we know about how stories arrest and detain even the least attentive human imaginations.

Knowing this is unlikely to change what’s going on. Nor is it likely to prompt a significant decline in the amount of ‘ruined lines’ that trudge their unhappy parade before our averted eyes. But who knows, perhaps it will in one case out of every 50, and that means one more good line that had the chance to be unalterably, unyieldingly, uncompromisingly good. Whatever happens, however this marvellous, maddening job changes over the years, the truth remains that there’s a vast number of incredible creative copywriters active in the industry today. They may occasionally get ignored, or overruled, but I don’t believe for a second that they’re not habitually writing the lines you really wish you’d been allowed to see.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

https://gasp.agency/media/copywriting-is

Adele Writes an Ad

https://gasp.agency/media/adele-writes-an-ad

This is, he reckons, no new thing. In men’s barbering there has always been a Beckham or a Gosling or a Kravitz – a dominant stylistic totem that relieves us of the need to make a choice while burdening us with a haircut that really belongs above more handsome faces than our own.

As I listened to this story I felt a growing sense of familiarity. I accepted this sweet, faintly sinister, Mescalification of the male aura, in the same way that anyone who has ever worked as a copywriter, or in a creative agency, would instantly recognise the truth in this sort of mass instinct to replicate.

In my early agency days it was Innocent and, I suppose, innocent. Brands who had been playing by a well-established set of rules, in terms of their tone of voice, suddenly saw this new kind of company who were charming and whimsical in a way we’d never really expected our groceries to be. None of us, at that point, had been so successfully flirted with by, say, a pack of Hob Nobs or a tin of spaghetti hoops.

And so, as with anything that feels fresh and new, a pleasure in experiencing it became a desire to consume it. See also everything humans have ever done to anything ever.

It was no surprise then to see a noticeable, almost universal, uptick in requests to ‘be more like Innocent’ in the copywriting briefs that came our way. Not all of this was blind, impulsive, fad-flipping – some clients talked about a long held desire to be funnier or more imaginative with their tone of voice for years, but having always been held back by the anxieties that come with doing the thing that nobody on your street does, even when it feels like what you should be doing.

But, I’ll admit there were plenty who simply wanted to squeeze the sweet juice of reverence over their muddled and neglected brand – pinching something for its popularity being far easier than finding out who you really are.

I’d like to say that we always tried our best to talk these clients out of this bandwagon branding, but that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes we did, and they’d overrule us, but even then we wouldn’t try too hard to steer them round. These were my small agency days where money was money, and creative integrity was strictly unbillable – but I’ll also admit that I wanted to work on something playful and light and so I’d keep my objections to myself.

You see, it’s never just the clients who get caught up in these obsessions. Shiny Toy Syndrome reaches deep into any copywriters’ heart and, if I’m honest, I’m reluctant to cultivate the cynicism required to make yourself entirely immune to the ‘fun new thing’. In fact, during the Innocent heyday, I wrote a couple of peculiar, fruit-themed poems, sent them to Innocent and they turned them into little illustrations for their Facebook. It was the copywriter’s equivalent of sending a vaguely threatening homemade wedding collage to your favourite Backstreet Boy, but I’ll admit I was thrilled to have my silly words enshrined in this great and holy cathedral of whimsy.

Since then, there have been many others – the recent ones I can think of being the likes of Oatly, Liquid Death and Surreal. I’ve seen work I enjoy from all of these places, and I think it must be incredibly difficult to be the brand that every other brand is trying to be like, even if most of them don’t get close.

But what most of us learned from episodes like The Age of Innocent, was that what brands really wanted wasn’t the specific tonal quirkiness of their current idol, it was the permission and the possibility to be funny in a way that still sells. Out of all the times I was told ‘we want to be a bit more like X’ I can’t think of a single one where the ‘X’ in question used what you might call an ‘earnest’ voice. One semi-exception was the time we were asked, with the slenderest of rationales, for a brand style that was ‘reminiscent of Sky Sports’ – a phrase that no creative career should ever go without.

Anecdotally, I can testify to a resurgence in briefs that invite humour. But, between you and I, it wouldn’t be unkind to reveal that most of the brands asking haven’t yet acquired the internal sense of self or ease – or maybe joy – required to let a joke be a joke. Seeing a brand be successfully funny – particularly when it’s a provocative sort of humour (like Liquid Death or Paddy Power) or an eccentric kind (like Innocent and Oatly) – is understandably seductive. But there is a stage missing between the realisation that you could be funny and the moment where, culturally, you’re confident enough to do it. Otherwise it’s like having 10 open mic comedians up on stage together, handing the jokes back and forth so everyone gets a say on what works and what doesn’t. As a rule of thumb, if you’re planning a humorous campaign and someone, anyone, uses the phrase ‘not comfortable with…’ more than twice, then you’re not ready to do it.

I suppose, just like haircuts, or trainers, or TV shows, or music, or art, or pastries the world of brands is wilfully, giddily vulnerable to ‘hype’. This isn’t bad or wrong, and if anyone here can say, and prove, they’ve never succumbed then I will personally pierce my ear and have my hair cut into a Mescalian nouveau mullet (or nu-mu).

But while the hot new thing has its appeal, and its value, the more interesting place to look is toward the things that are neither new nor hot, but are instead consistently, thoughtfully, inventively good. You can probably learn a little from Liquid Death, but only really in terms of either what you’re not brave enough to do or what your audience isn’t brave enough to see. But from the likes of Specsavers or Kit Kat, I think there’s an enormous amount to learn about what it takes to build, share, maintain and evolve a personality that is yours alone.

It’s hard, and a little terrifying, to be the only one in the room doing your thing in your way. But if you’ve taken the time to figure out who you are, how you sound, how you look and why all these things can only be the way they are, then you’re going to win admiring glances and maybe much more. Better for any brand, I think, to be mulletless in a world of Mescals.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

I know so much about so many fellow freelancers’ nightmare client experiences that it’s impossible for this next sentence to sound anything other than smug and braggy. I’ve never really had a dud, or at least not a serious one. Like everyone, I’ve had late payers – one so late that I created a party invitation to celebrate the 100^-day anniversary of outstanding payment. Frankly, I was a little disappointed they paid just before I could send it.

Then there are the clients who are so wrapped up in the tangles and trials of their own Very Important Business that they end up treating freelancers like just another office commodity – a photocopier or Dolce Gusto coffee maker that you can emotionally damage. I have a client that is a big company, owned by an even bigger company, and they have the habit of asking me if I’m free to do a job and then totally ignoring me regardless of whether I say I can or can’t. These days, I try not to answer their calls.

And, of course, I’ve also had the occasional client who was insatiably picky, or excessively needy, or simply wanted to write the thing themselves and had clearly been told by someone important they weren’t allowed to. But, over the years, I’ve got good at filtering out anything that I find too annoying and my rule of ‘Nice People or Fun Work or Extravagant Pay’ has held relatively true.

So as far as freelance horror stories go I am embarrassingly light – which does make me consider whether I’m really a freelancer at all.

Enter Spud

The only time I can truly claim to have been ‘done over’ is less to do with treachery, neglect or wickedness than it is about how easily, and imprudently, I’m drawn to oddballs.

The client in this story had a wonderfully silly name. Which is annoying because I can’t really use it, but whatever I substitute it for will be a poor imitation of just how silly it was. I’m going to call him Steven Spud, and I’m not happy about it.

Steven Spud entered my life in the summer of 2024. I’d been cast abruptly into the freelance life after the swift and, honestly, stinky, culling of the entire creative team from my last place of work. I’d always rather fancied the idea of putting more than just the occasional egg into the freelance basket, but there are few situations – however enticing – that you can fully enjoy if you’ve been roughly hurled into them without warning.

Anyway, things were ticking away nicely and business was brisk. I’d started to ease myself out of bad freelancing habits and was now only watching a film from the Jaws series once a day, usually after having achieved something financially or creatively meaningful.

It was on such a day when Spud made an appearance. This was all before quite so many people on LinkedIn were allowing A.I. to do their thinking and talking for them, so while his initial message read a little unnaturally to me I had no qualms about replying to it. In fact, in a bid to be as reliable a narrator as I can reasonably be, I’ll admit that the oddness of the initial message made me want to respond to it more. Here’s what I found curious about that first contact:

1. His name, which I swear was better and weirder than Steven Spud.

2. He described his business to me in a way you’d describe your business to a person who has a long and infamous history of stealing other peoples’ business ideas.

3. He very quickly, and faux-casually, brandished a number that was either what the business was worth, what he was aiming to earn, or just a number he really liked. That number was $600 million.

4. He used the word disruptive twice in the same sentence. I don’t remember precisely how it went, but it was something like ‘Disrupting the markets in order to promote value, growth and disruption.’ I exaggerate, but not by much.

5. Best (oddest) of all, he broke off the message at an unexpected place, continuing it a few minutes later with an apology that he’d had to urgently attend to ‘a deal’. This would characterise our every exchange and it seemed he was perpetually juggling our conversations with the making of all these deals.

Anyway, the tone, the content, the weird brags, the spectacular name, were all enough for me to agree to a meeting. That meeting was scheduled, rescheduled and then returned to the original schedule all for the sake of, you guessed it, ‘deals’.

A Bamboozling Occurs

We met over Zoom, or Teams or some such abomination and my initial inkling, that I was dealing with an oddball, was immediately, even dramatically, confirmed. The face of Steven Spud filled the screen. It was a well-kept and angular sort of face, pleasing but certainly not reassuring, like a handsome hexagon. His background was blurred but seemed to radiate a grubby golden light, like he was conducting the call from Donald Trump’s worst toilet.

I’d say we exchanged the usual pleasantries but I never got the chance. As soon as Spud had confirmed that I was indeed on the call he unleashed his pitch. Actually, he unleashed what I’d imagine was three or four different versions of his pitch, old drafts woven in with spontaneous new thoughts and a seasoning of made-up words, to create some sort of high-speed jet of shapeless narrative starch – like filling a pressure washer with mash and firing it, point blank, into your own face.

It would be a lie to say I followed even the basic gist of what I was being told, and I see now that was the point. He spoke the way we all used to speak to our friends when we couldn’t find them in town and we had just 8 seconds of our Orange ‘Everyday 50’ minutes left. It was rapid, it was urgent and it was, I suppose deliberately, disorientating.

That’s not to say that the red flags weren’t gathering and fluttering. The reason he’d reached out to me, he babbled, was because he’d had disappointing experiences with no fewer than three copywriters. Again, this is something I’d ordinarily respond to by asking the person who said it to look behind them at a funny dog, while I took the opportunity to vault the fence and dash for the hills. But by this point, the idiot monkey part of my brain was so completely intoxicated by this eccentric character that the idea of dignified withdrawal seemed utterly appalling.

So, Spud had been underwhelmed by no less than three of my fellow writers, which is not impossible but, given how easy it is to identify and approach so many genuinely excellent writers, this seemed, at best, a failing of his judgement as much as anything.

What Spud wanted, and was yet to be given, was ‘His Story’ – a concise and compelling account he could present to any prospective client and their only question would be ‘can I go and get my good pen because I’m about to sign the heck out of this contract?’

I was, I’ll admit, a little underwhelmed. To have gone so far down this rabbit hole and be confronted with something so humdrum was a let-down – like meeting an alien who only wants to invite you to a networking breakfast at the Travel Lodge at Watford Gap services.

There’s a Catch

But, the work seemed easy and not obviously evil, so I was just about to agree to it when we got firmly back on odder tracks. Steven Spud, disruptor, deal-maker, hexagonal hottie, could not pay me – yet. Business was great, just look at all the deals he kept telling me he was doing, but to unlock the cash injection he required, he needed me to write him the story.

‘Huh’, said my grown-up brain, who is scrawny and unconvincing. ‘This seems like a really bad idea’.

‘Ooooh, ooooooh, oooooh!’ screamed my idiot monkey brain, tearing off my grown-up brain’s leg and thrashing him with it.

‘Ok Steven Spud’, I said, ‘I’m interested’.

What we agreed was this. I would write the narrative. Spud would get one, and only one, draft for free (a concession that honoured the dying wish of my grown-up brain). When the narrative began hauling in the cash – and Spud was convinced this was indeed the missing piece in his jigsaw of disruptive disruption – we would agree on a fee for the work. Nobody said the words ‘riches beyond your wildest imaginings’ but a sense of that was certainly dangled.

But you all know already how this story pans out. Of course I did the work. Of course I sent it. Of course I never heard from him again. Frankly, I’d have been a little sad if it had gone any other way.

I shan’t try and revise or reframe any of my idiocy in this odd episode. I knew something about this smelled peculiar, but as much as I tell myself I did it for the adventure, a gullible corner of my brain was sold on the whole untold riches business. I maintain that I did it because it would give me an unusual story to tell/milk, but I can’t pretend that I wouldn’t have preferred that story to end with me haggling with a Bermudan speedboat vendor.

Spud had come and gone. He’d got what he wanted and was now presumably sat in his grubby gold room, cackling at having made $600 million off the back of yet another chump copywriter. Part of me wonders if this is a long and careful con – scamming just a little professionally written copy out of a string of writers until he has a whole brochure. If I’m right, and that’s his (admittedly daft) masterplan, then I’d urge you to let yourself be swindled like I was. At least then you and I could laugh together about his real name.

I’m hoping, by this point in the story, you’re not expecting me to have learned any sort of lesson. I have never been hoodwinked out of payment since then, but that’s not to say I haven’t made poor decisions for stupid reasons. I regret some of these, but rarely for long, and rarely in the way you’d regret something really worth regretting – like poisoning a relative or paddle boarding. I don’t always get it right, but part of me wonders if I’d have a poorer imagination if I did. Maybe that’s just the deal.

Reflections on a Swindle

When I sat down to write this I looked up Steven Spud. At the time he vanished, with 198 pilfered words, I’d only chased him the once – it would have felt like a betrayal of our peculiar pact for me to hound him as if this was something that had happened to real people in the real world. But, in fairness to Spud, he’s never made any attempt to conceal himself from me. We’re still connected on LinkedIn, channels of communication remain open if either of us ever wanted to reminisce about old times. If so inclined, I suppose I could send him this story and see how much of the $600 million it might be worth for Steven Spud to remain Steven Spud. I joke. If I sent him the story he’d surely just pinch it and somehow sell it to The New Yorker.

So while I may not have learned anything myself from this whole grubby business, I do have a slightly crumpled lesson I’d like to leave you with. There are few worse feelings than for someone to take a little of your imagination and give you nothing, not even a kind word, in return. I see creatives everywhere who have their designs or their ideas or even their social media posts stolen without compensation or credit. It’s an inexcusable liberty that is continually written off as ‘gathering inspiration’ or, worse, ‘flattering’ and if something you made is taken without your knowledge or permission then you have every right to make a frightful scene.

But this whole Spud episode didn’t necessarily feel like that to me. If anything I felt more like an accomplice in a heist where a fake, a bungler and an idiot monkey tried to tunnel into a bank vault and ended up in Halfords. Spud took my words, I took his ridiculousness and neither of us can really say we lost more than we got. So while we freelancers should, and must, be tuned into the clients who aren’t prepared to pay what our ideas are worth, I do think, from time to time, and for the right reasons, it’s ok to just do something really, really silly.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

If you’ve ever worked in a creative agency – ideally a small one with all the turbulence that entails – you have surely had to wrestle with the contradiction of competing, often ferociously, for a prize that’s very likely to make your life worse in small, but significant, ways. This condition, in case you hadn’t guessed, is called ‘pitching’.

I recall us all being gathered into the big meeting room – the nice one, the one we save for clients because you can only faintly hear the flush of the ‘serious’ toilet from there – where the agency bosses announced to the studio that we’d won a pitch for a client we’d already grown to hate. The different reactions in such a moment aren’t hard to categorise. The creatives who have sacrificed a minimum of 18 hours of sleep to work on the pitch – and in doing so have been afforded a bitter taste of what working on this brand in daylight might be like – offer weak smiles that quickly descend into mumbling and, finally, an inward whimper. The agency bosses, who strive to bring in the new business that will keep the radiators burning, look upon us like hungry Victorian factory children who have ungraciously pushed aside our succulent roast goose. In other words, nobody leaves the room feeling any happier, only more ashamed and/or resentful depending on when you last saw your own bedroom.

The Place

This kind of thing happened a fair bit, but there is one pitch that has haunted me for the better part of a decade. I shan’t name any names – partly because I’ve forgotten most of the important ones – so for the rest of this yarn I shall simply refer to them as ‘The Place’.

I’m not sure if The Place invited us to pitch, or we’d somehow wheedled our way onto their list. Our agency was small but it had a reputation for tenacity, which landed us clients far bigger than you’d usually see in a shop of our size. It also meant that any sniff of new business, however piquant, would be pursued with a steely eye, a straight back and as many unsolicited phone calls as it would take to be noticed.

The pitch for The Place was fairly normal, which is to say you would probably struggle to identify any part of it as truly normal. We had a good record in pitching, but still lacked confidence as an agency – which usually led to showing far more work than was needed to make the point. As the days were busy with billable business, the pitch work – which was multiplying steadily in the shadows like a deadly mushroom – took place late into the night, a weird but not unpleasant experience that I’ve written about before.

Cut to the day of the pitch and, unrested and, indeed, restless, we flipped dutifully through our foam boards, gulping in the tacky Spray Mount from the ones we’d only just finished in the early hours of that morning. I can’t remember much about how the meeting itself went. They nodded. We exaggerated. They asked a few questions. We lied about how much fun we’d all had. And that was that.

Enter Todd. Enter Chad.

So, we won, and our two main clients – I shall call them Todd and Chad – paid a visit to our office to discuss the next steps. This initial conference passed off without incident – we flattered them, as you do with a client when you know, instinctively, that’s what they need from an agency. Even the vigorous, panicked flushing of a faraway toilet couldn’t derail the feeling that, while this was unlikely to be a hoot, it would not be a headache.

This assessment quickly, and definitively, proved to be rash. A week or so after the pitch, and with only the first, very rough, draft stages of the inaugural project having been shared with them, Todd and Chad’s tone turned decidedly frosty. They were blunt. They were accusatory. They tossed around words like ‘frankly’ and ‘underwhelmed’, which was especially odd as we weren’t really expecting them to be whelmed, in any particular direction, at such an early stage.

Todd and Chad demanded a meeting at our office. Nobody used the word ‘crisis’, but in the studio it quickly became known as The Bollocking.

‘Are you on the invite for The Bollocking?’

‘No, you?’

‘Yeah, but I’ll probably hammer a long nail through my hand the night before.’

‘Better do a foot too.’

‘Good idea.’

Todd and Chad arrived at The Bollocking bearing an expression that’s since been popularised by the business sidekicks on The Apprentice – Lord Sugar’s mirthless snitches who spend most of the show frowning at people in suits that don’t fit them as they try to acquire a Soviet submarine for the price of a Pot Noodle. If you can picture that, then you can picture Todd and Chad.

We shuffled into the meeting, with a very real sense that Todd and Chad were going to void the contract and send us packing (tough to do when we were in our own offices, but I suppose we could have filed quietly out to the bin area like it was a fire drill).

This sense of imminent disentanglement only grew and grew as Todd and Chad took it in turns to point out all our failings, pulling off the impressive feat of outlining all the ways in which their expectations had not been met without ever giving an idea of what those expectations actually were. It also became clear that Todd was chiefly unhappy with us, while Chad was more unhappy that we’d made Todd unhappy. When it was Chad’s turn to berate us (Todd needed several breaks to regain composure and eat some free pastries) we noticed that Chad could only really frame his displeasure in terms of how we’d hurt Todd – a sort of ‘look what you’ve done to your mother’ guilt-trip bundled up in a River Island waistcoat.

So this went on, and on and soon we were rather eager for them to simply drop the hammer and let us go – mainly so we could dash back to the studio and milk this undignified story for all it was worth. But then it ended by Todd briefing us on our next project. He did it sullenly, like someone feeding a cat who has, only moments before, done a bad poo in a warm tumble drier. But he briefed us nonetheless, while Chad glared at us with eyes that said ‘don’t you dare let this fine man down again’.

We shuffled away. We did the work. They hated it, told us how awful we were, and then handed us the next brief.

You may be wondering why we didn’t simply fire such an obviously irredeemable client, or at least give them the sense that firing was not inconceivable. To be honest, this was the central topic of conversation in the studio throughout the whole ordeal. But we knew from experience that it would take something extraordinary for any client to be fired from our agency. If a paying client, with smoking bazooka in hand, stood beside the burning wreckage of our offices, they’d surely be kept on providing they could offer the vague hope of ‘something exciting’ in Q4. We took the money, and that meant we also took the shit.

Essence of an egging

I don’t really remember how this all ended. I stopped going to meetings with Todd and Chad, simply because, despite having absolutely nothing good to say about the creative work, they never said anything we could use to make it better – even when faced with the actual question ‘do you have anything to say about the creative work that will help us make it better?’. It was like walking into a room, being brutally egged by mysterious figures for 45 minutes and then being dismissed with the words ‘let that be a lesson to you’. I was eggy, I was fed up, but I was perpetually unenlightened.

Now, if you’ve ever worked in the small agency world, you’ll know that there is one, and only one, reasonable response to anything like this. You tell yourself that, however infuriating things are right now, it’ll be worth it for the funny story you get to tell. And it was. I don’t even really remember exactly how angry and powerless I felt at the time, but I do remember extracting many gratifying laughs from my ‘worst client we ever had’ routine.

You may be relieved to know that I also made a vow to never, ever have anything to do with The Place, Todd or Chad for the rest of my copywriting career. Annoyingly though, I think I’ve inadvertently broken this vow, and may have done a little accidental work for Chad (or Todd) through an agency I help out from time-to-time as a freelancer. I just didn’t really recognise them, partly because my memory is poor, and partly because every sockless brick of spam in a feather-stuffed gilet looks the same to me. I curse myself for doing the work, but Todd (or Chad) was surprisingly happy with what was done, so either I’ve got better or they have. I’m not sure which makes me feel worse.

An uncommonly sticky spoon

I found myself reflecting on this recently because, throughout my life, I’ve maintained a remarkable record for losing contests. I lose often, I lose conclusively and, occasionally, I’ll lose spectacularly. My daughter, who should remain smaller and weaker than me for at least another few years, defeats me easily in a thumb war. I don’t even let her win, I sometimes push her to try and gain an advantage. I’ve also never beaten my wife at Connect 4, although this is more down to her freakish genius when it comes to shape-and-colour games. I’m sure she once beat me in three moves, which is impressive in chess but surely impossible in Connect 4. When I suggest we switch to Scrabble she suddenly loses the game-playing spirit, not realising that I am really bad at Scrabble and she would most likely beat me at that too.

All of this is to say that, for someone so accustomed to, and comfortable with, losing a competitive encounter, the idea of ‘winning’ a pitch always felt particularly seductive to me. This was, in some ways, a creative egg-and-spoon race and, for all my many deficiencies as a human adult, creatively speaking I am blessed with an uncommonly sticky spoon.

But then you learn, through experiences like the one we had with The Place, that winning a pitch is one of the few contests where you have no idea what it is you’re competing for. A signed contract, a commitment to certain briefs – sure. But also absolutely no clue about the relationship, the personalities or the power-dynamic that you’re desperately striving to win. You compete to get picked, but then find yourself stuck with the people who picked you.

An abundance of Chadness

Like I say, I can’t grumble about this. I’ve dedicated far more creative energy to telling, refining and indulging this story than I ever put into the work that Todd and Chad hated so much. I shan’t say I feel sorry for Todd and Chad, partly because that feels patronising, but mostly because it spoils my story of what goons they are.

They were, to a more than usual degree, a very typical sort of character in the small agency story. People who have weight they desperately need to throw around, but lack the nerve or status to throw it anywhere near their own colleagues. They find agencies, preferably ones that are small and, let’s face it, grateful for the work, and they use those agencies as a way to behave like the boss they’ll never be chosen to be. And agencies, if they must, take it, and try to make things work as best we can.

Todds and Chads don’t change. They can’t be taught how to lead, because they’re too busy trying to rule. The best you can do, is watch them closely. Give them all your attention. Listen to every word they say and then nudge them gently, again and again, into the holes they leave in their own story.

Most of all, turn them into an amusing tale where nobody – not even all the other Todds and Chads in the world, oblivious as they are to their Toddness and Chadness – is laughing with them.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

The brief is asking me to target people born between 2005-10. My idea requires the audience to demonstrate comprehensive knowledge of the Thundercats cartoon (1985-89) simply because I refuse to believe they don’t know the things I know.

Bravado

Do I have extensive experience of writing about multifunctional primary antioxidant compounds for long-term thermal stabilisation? No, but I’m sure I’ll just pick it up as I go along.

Concentration (lack of)

When it works, I can concentrate pretty much like an adult human. The trouble is that my concentration is itself incapable of concentration and will often interrupt us both to point out a baby who looks like Dame Judi Dench.

Decisiveness

Not a terrible thing… providing the decision you’ve made is actually a good one. But to be decisive when you’re also a rash and reckless judge of most situations, is less helpful.

Elegance

A fixation on James Baldwin’s command to ‘write a sentence as clean as a bone’ has often led to excessive tinkering in the least consequential moments. You should, for example, never reach the tenth draft of an ‘out of office’ message.

Frivolity

Explain to me at great length, and in considerable detail, the importance of your brief – if you must. Just know that I will probably be thinking about Wesley Snipes, or something Snipes-adjacent, for most of it.

Gung-ho

There are writers who think carefully, prepare thoroughly and plan extensively before even reaching for a pencil. By the time they get started I’ve scrawled out pages of disembodied headlines, scribbles, ravings, cusses, funny poems, terrible lies and ideas that I don’t yet properly understand.

Hilarity

Being, by nature, a hoot, my default approach to almost every brief is to look for the laugh. Trying to find the gag in funeral services or critical kidney treatment is neither wise, nor easy, and yet…

Ignorance

I may have grown out of this one a little, as I’m now quite happy to ask the stupidest of questions in any meeting, at any time and at any volume. But in my younger days I would hear strange and complicated things that made absolutely no sense to me and simply nod along as if we were all discussing our favourite kinds of mainstream soup.

Judo

I was forced to learn it as a boy and was roundly pummelled by more diligent students every Saturday morning for two years. This has left me with two significant neuroses that impede my copywriting – One, I am suspicious of anyone who is visibly trying harder than me. Two, whenever you speak to me I will be secretly calculating how I could grab you by the lapels and hurl you through the wall.

Knees

They are not in a good way, although this is probably a greater hinderance to my badminton career than my copywriting one.

Lies

If you’re a good person offering me a dull brief I will make up a preposterous lie about my availability to avoid hurting your feelings. For example: “I’m so sorry, I can’t write that white paper about emerging technologies in regenerative agriculture, I’m being stalked through the central American jungle by an invisible alien hunter who wants to pull my skull out of my face.”

Meandering

I generally refuse to take the shortest route between two points. In life, this has led me to many strange and interesting places – not least the time I encountered (some may say ‘startled’) Sean Bean in a lonely alley. In copywriting it has done the same – allowing me to happily sacrifice so-called ‘Efficiency’ (with a big E) for adventure. (And honestly, if this is actually a weakness then I’m perfectly content to be a weakling.)

No case studies

No. Never. Put them away and get the hell off my porch. I do not do them. I do not want to look at them. I’d sooner pick my nose with an erratically sprung spear gun than write one ever again.

Optimism (blind)

It’ll be fine.

Patience (im)

I will sit completely still and stare at a sentence I think I can improve for the same time it takes to watch every film in which Samuel L Jackson gets eaten*. But if I’m in a meeting that I don’t need to be in, particularly when I could be back at my desk staring at that not-quite-perfect sentence, then I’ll have the demeanour of a submarine captain who’s accidentally opened fire on Leonardo DiCaprio’s party yacht.

(*Jurassic Park – 127 mins (eaten by dinosaur) + Deep Blue Sea – 105 mins (eaten by genetically modified super shark) = Total minutes: 232 mins. P.s. Spoiler alert)

Quietness

You want to sit together in a meeting room that will be either too bright or too hot and ‘toss some ideas around’. I want to go and wander around a silent and secluded pond, contemplating, among other things, what all these geese are so cross about.

Reason

I often have no real reason behind the thing that I’ve done, other than it’s cool and it works. I’ve learned that this makes people nervous so I have to then make up windy and waffly reasons for doing what I did, and everyone seems to be happier.

Sandwiches

I need them to live. I need them to think. If I am working on a company laptop it will take you generations to extract all the crumbs from the keyboard.

Talking nonsense

Again, not really a weakness but will appear to be one from the outside. Creatives talking nonsense to one another, without direction, restraint or purpose, is the nuclear reactor for this whole daft business. Without the freedom to let your mind roam and play and bump into other minds that are also roaming and playing, a creative brain is essentially a camel on a hamster wheel.

Up (getting)

I do not sit well. Particularly at desks. More particularly at desks in offices. Most particularly at desks in offices simply because that’s where someone has decided I should be. I can do it for a bit, but I would rather be doing the things that are not sitting – chiefly mooching, wandering, meandering or, if possible, sprawling.

Verbosity

Me say big word when not-big-word better.

Wesley Snipes

[see ‘F’]

X Files

I was once accused of having an ‘Agent Mulder complex’ which was, and is, both an entirely fair assessment and something that has haunted my every moment for decades.

Youth

I have very little left. If the evil machine overlords were assessing all humans so they could divide us up into either ‘Servants’ or ‘Fuel’ I wouldn’t even bother filling out the survey.

Zing

I cannot add this to your copy until at least one of us knows what you mean by it.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

I have never once turned back because of a goose. Encountering these deplorable creatures – more goblin than fowl if you ask me – on a narrow canal path, I have never once let them bully me into retreat. Yes, I have skittered past them in the manner of an old lady whose shopping trolley, laden with tinned shortbread and a five-kilo sack of Horlicks, proves too weighty for her downhill journey. Yes I have shuffled precariously close to a canal so dirty it would surely kill me in a more unpleasant manner than a prolonged goose mauling. Yes, I have squealed, rather loudly. But I have never turned back.

I’ve approached my few spells in the copywriting wilderness in a similar way. It is a condition policed by a great many obstacles that, in a way, will spit and snap and defecate just as threateningly as the canal-side alpha goose. So much so that it can often feel like Recruitment (with a big R) has been carefully manufactured to perform a series of shadowy functions, none of which have that much to do with recruiting anyone.

Right now, I am a whisker away from the end of a 12-month contract, and am happy to say I’ve been dallying with one or two potential new adventures that, whether or not they come off, have been managed warmly and considerately throughout. There have been, as there always is, a few abominations – but all of this is a story for another time. Next week perhaps.

What I’m more concerned with today is a significant shift in my own attitude since I last found myself on the chopping block, if not precisely the scrap heap. Having been, like too many creative professionals, thrashed with the redundancy slipper my emotional state was mostly one of panic, with dashes of fury, helplessness and, from time to time, terror.

Had I simply spent all of my time looking for, and most of the time, not finding, work I would have been in a dismal place – which, for someone who depends, however recklessly, on a certain breeziness of the imagination to get by, would have only made things worse. Instead, a familiar old instinct kicked in and distracted me from my predicament in the most welcome way. I began to lark about.

I’ve always known that writing is my power supply. If I can start the day, as I am now, by simply sitting down and noodling my way to some curious thought or other, then I am fit for whatever else the daylight hours may require of me. And, though as susceptible to bouts of malaise and inertia, as the next layabout, I feel fortunate (if undeserving) to have been granted such a fool-proof exit strategy.

And so, as I waited for work to present itself, I larked. I wrote a collection of silly poems. I began a short story that got bigger and bigger until it became too big and, frightened, I put it away for a while. I finally finished my follow up to Copywriting Is… (although the ghastly business of reviewing what I’ve written haunts me daily). And I also busied my brain with a dozen other little creative morsels – none of them bearing any particular purpose or ambition, other than to remind myself that it’s more useful to feel creative than it is to be Productive (with a big P).

Right now, I’m following the same pattern – working with a handful of my best designer pals on silly little projects that are unlikely to make our fortune, because they’re much too valuable for that. I’ve even started crossing the streams, as it were, and introduced a little larking to the business of applying for jobs – and, I should add, have had far more success with a creative approach than I have ever had with a proper, professional, po-faced pandering to the process.

In theory I shall be ‘out of work’ come the first week of January, but that doesn’t seem to trouble me quite as much as it did, or should. Of course, I need to be earning – Old Jonny Mortgage is unlikely to be pacified with a grubby limerick – but with the spirit of the lark it feels as if there have never been more ideas in need of my attention. I shan’t go as far as to say that this sort of thing will definitely get me a job (though it might), but it’ll certainly make me far better at whatever it is I do next.

So yes, the dread goose is once again barring the way. But a sharp nip to the seat of my slacks is a very small price to pay to simply go on.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

Upside – I hate gardening, and yet I crave that feeling of having planted, tended and grown something useful or beautiful, or ideally, both. Creating a tone of voice from a tiny seedling, feels a lot like that.

Downside – sometimes, alongside the TOV guide, you may be asked to produce a style guide, which is a different field of potatoes altogether. If there is a way to care deeply about the proper punctuation of bullet points then I have never acquired it.

OOH

Upside – what other job can you do where your brilliance, wit and intellectual dynamism are physically manifested in a 60-foot, high-resolution oblong you can go and visit in real life?

Downside – if your idea became horribly deformed on its way through the sign-off process, a 60-foot, high-resolution oblong is a terribly large burden on your creative self-esteem.

Radio

Upside – it’s a cliché, I know, but nothing is more creatively limitless than radio. Who’s going to tell you that the budget won’t stretch to a sentient, sexually suggestive, cashew nut if it’s all just make-believe anyway?

Downside – whatever you write will be too long. Even if it’s not too long it’ll be too long. I can’t explain why. Nobody can.

Brand films

Upside – there is something pure (by marketing standards, not pure like the heart of a baby monkey) about trying to tell the story of who you are to people who have never heard of you –and making them glad they have now.

Downside – Like a deeply tedious game of Mortal Kombat you will have to progress from boss to boss to final boss to get the goddam thing approved, accumulating dull and irrelevant additions as you go. Unlike Mortal Kombat, you can’t even look forward to the sweet relief of having your head punched off.

Healthcare

Upside – there is something heart-lifting, and deeply reassuring, about learning just how smart modern day healthcare devices and treatments really are.

Downside – it is unsettling to learn quite so much about all the ways your body can, and probably will, fail you.

Case studies

Upside – absolutely none at all, unless you count the small chance that the extinction meteor will strike at the precise moment you’re about to hear about all the things you got wrong.

Downside – it’s all downside. Even if you were to buy a puppy with the money you made from writing case studies you’d wake up one morning to find that dog had eaten your legs.

B2B

Upside – this isn’t your grandma’s B2B. These days, most brands are open to bigger ideas and more creative means of standing out. A lot of them will even hire you specifically because they want to do something fun.

Downside – you may well become fascinated by things that stubbornly refuse to fascinate the people around you. I have been asked, and not politely, to stop talking about offshore windfarm installation.

Promoting yourself

Upside – you can, in theory, do absolutely anything.

Downside – it is harder than shoveling lava back into an erupting volcano with a shovel made from Coco Pops.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

https://gasp.agency/media/copywriting-is

Adele Writes an Ad

https://gasp.agency/media/adele-writes-an-ad

But as you get older, and maybe even wiser, in your creative life you may well start wondering about the nature of your creative process – particularly if, like me, it all seems too unwieldy and idiosyncratic to ever be dependable, let alone employable.

One aspect of my creative life that I have, by accident, come to understand better though is the idea of creative drought or block. If, at its best, my brain is a healthily gurgling mountain stream of ideas, at it’s worst it’s a de-plumbed urinal in an abandoned Victorian bucket factory.

And, whenever I was struck by a bout of fruitless pondering, I’d diagnose it with a condition I’d never attempted to properly understand – creative block.

As is often the antidote to my own rashly overconfident assumptions, I found a book. It’s called ‘The Midnight Disease: the drive to write, writer’s block and the creative brain’ by Alice W. Flaherty and it’s an extraordinary insight into how creative brains work, why they work and, of course, why they stop working.

Having, at long last, taken the trouble to know what I mean when I talk about creative block, I realised that I’d probably never suffered from it in my life. It turns out that my creativity, my imaginative faculties, were there all along, it’s the rest of me that was causing problems.

The driest moments of my creative career have usually been a failing of actions and conditions rather than inspiration. If I am sat still for too long, if I don’t go outside, if I don’t walk, if I haven’t read anything wonderful in a while, if I’m trapped in too many meetings, if my last drink of water was during Kevin Keegan’s spell as England manager – all of these things pile on a certain heaviness from which my creativity, still eager as ever to have a crack, cannot heave itself free.

All along, the creative part of me has been responsible for itself – and yet my responsibility to provide the elements it needs to break through was too often neglected. And so, while I may be no closer to understanding how my creativity works, I am much better at understanding what it needs to work.

Crucially, I also came to accept that, even knowing how to prepare the ideal setting for my imagination, it wasn’t possible to do that all the time. My creative self is not lacking for stamina, but the flesh and bones its wrapped inside certainly are. A certain forgiveness, then, when I can’t give my imagination what it needs has been a healthy addition to my practice – not trying to work when I know that the trying is all I’ll achieve. But the trade-off for these bouts of necessary inertia was a promise that, when I do feel like doing something creative, even if there are no briefs on the table, I create.

Among the hundred-or-so passages I scribbled down from The Midnight Disease, there was one that served as a handy affirmation for this bargain I’d made with myself. Flaherty points out that, perhaps, the real point is:

“not to keep yourself from writing when not inspired, but to be ruthless about writing whenever inspiration hits.”

My own workings are not entirely about inspiration, but a stack of equally important, if perilously teetering, Jenga blocks. Movement. Space. Quiet. The sky, and a dozen-or-so other components. But when all of them are stacked together, however long it may be before they tumble, is when the good stuff gets done.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

https://gasp.agency/media/copywriting-is

Adele Writes an Ad

https://gasp.agency/media/adele-writes-an-ad

An extraordinarily effective way to depress yourself when searching for a copywriting role is to succumb to a LinkedIn ‘chumming’ – otherwise known as those posts that ask all job-seeking copywriters to hurl themselves into the comment section in order to be considered. I have no doubt that some writers have found work – perhaps even good work – this way, but the idea of scrambling over a feed full of fellow creatives to get noticed for a job I know precisely two sentences about feels like it will do me more harm than good.

I will put less faith in my CV

In many ways, choosing the best person for a creative role by examining their CV is like selecting the most capable pilot based on how reassuringly they can pronounce the words ‘currently experiencing a little turbulence’. However often the recruitment system proves it to be a folly, I refuse to believe that taking a creative approach to landing a creative role can be the wrong thing to do. And while it would be foolish to neglect the CV altogether, it seems even more rash to believe that my resume, stuffed somewhere into a block of near identical cousins, is the way to make an impression.

I will do far less searching and a little more seeking

A job search is a ravenous act. It is a gobbling, a guzzling, an insatiable slurping down of all and any available morsels, however lacking they may be in flavour or nourishment. I know this, because I’ve done it – and wrote about it, with an appropriate degree of self-admonishment, in these very pages.

Seeking, however, is a considerate act. Thinking more carefully, and deciding more slowly, about what feels like a role where I would be happy and valued and, as far as it goes, safe. Admittedly, it can be hard to be patient with your heart pounding, and the hot, wet breath of the mortgage snuffling at the door, but a day spent ruling out jobs I’d hate to do could never be a wasted day.

I will try to remember that I am not James Bond

In a James Bond film every other person exists merely to embellish his story. His bosses. His lovers. His croupiers. The nameless sap who he fatally chops across the back of the neck. All of them are subservient to the immediate – though often not important – needs of James Bond. These days I think it’s called Main Character Syndrome, and in a copywriting job search it can be a significant drain on your self-worth.

The plain fact is that I am not the only copywriter out there looking for work, applying for the same roles, feeling the same fears and doubts and frustrations. If you believe that you’re somehow the star in this great job seeking adventure then every time you’re passed over or missed out or left behind feels like a crushing blow instead of the simple, blameless, shameless realities of looking for work alongside so many other talented and creative people.

If I must panic, I shall try to panic in a useful direction

Joblessness, whether impending, spontaneous or prolonged is, ironically, a time of bountiful employment for your brain’s more malignant tendencies. In the first few weeks after my redundancy last year I noticed a new feeling that couldn’t be entirely explained by my daily routine of miniature Crunchies and thinking about the fact that Willem Dafoe filmed Mr Bean’s Holiday and Antichrist in pretty much the same year.

It was a sort of rattling energy that wasn’t necessarily asking me to do anything, but also was clearly discontented with my inertia. It was, of course, some breed of panic and, before I really knew what to do with it, I would let it lead me into rampant spells of truly useless ‘busyness’ or bouts of equally useless catastrophising.

Now I can see it for what it is, I know that it’s not wholly bad. In its own idiot manner it’s probably trying to help us both out. So now, when I feel the rattle I have a list of meaningful creative tasks that I’m able to point that energy toward – stuff that’s less direct than messaging a recruiter or filling out an application, but will do me far more good in a way that maybe matters more. Stuff, you can probably guess, a little like this.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

Give me your ‘about us’ pages. Give me the chairman’s rambling introduction to the annual report. Give me your dullest child’s personal statement for their university application. Give me the emails that you want to sound snotty, but not too snotty. Give me all of this but, if you have a heart, don’t give me the rationales.

Like all copywriters, there are few jobs I won’t agree to tackle – even if there are more than a few that I’d rather leave well alone. For example, I decided a while ago that my days of writing case studies are behind me, and unless something extraordinary happens (emotionally or, more likely, financially) I shan’t complete another case study between now and the day my ashes are discreetly scattered in a quiet corner of Muji.

The cursed rationale, though, is harder to escape, particularly when you’re the author of the idea that needs rationalising. All I know is that it’s a type of copywriting I certainly haven’t grown to despise – the ill-feeling was present from the off.

For a little context, I should probably say here that the two things I most dislike in the copywriting life are the things I find hard and the things I see no point in. The rationale, in my admittedly unreliable opinion, drapes itself neatly across both.

Tackling the difficulty element first – I’m not quite sure why I find it so hard to write about an idea that I’ve had. Surely the idea itself was the difficult bit and, as it’s (deadbeat) father, I should be able to knock out a quick and compelling summary of why it exists, how it works and what it will, with a little luck, achieve. But, even when I’ve written hundreds (occasionally thousands) of words to bring the idea to life in various forms, the thought of producing a mere 50 to ‘sell it’ gives me the chills.

(I remember one occasion where I was asked to produce three separate rationales, and to aim for ‘around 250 words’ for each one. It reminded me of an old Spike Milligan joke from his war diaries. When ordered out on a 5-mile training run he remarked: ‘5 Miles? That wasn’t a run, that was deportation!’)

I feel a little more comfortable explaining, perhaps if only to myself, why I find the stupid things so unnecessary. The very best copywriters and marketers I’ve known, assured me that a good idea should tell its own story – and that anything other than the briefest attempt to introduce it for an audience only serves to undermine its appeal.

The whole business of burdening our creations with a rationale reminds me of a passage I once read in an essay by the playwright Tennessee Williams. On the subject of writing about your own writing, Williams had this to say:

“Writing an article about your play puts you in a fairly untenable position. Three courses seem to be open. You can praise it or you can denigrate it or you can explain it. The first is surely fatal, although it has been attempted. The second is foolish. If you seriously thought it was a bad play you would not have put it into production, because the failure of a play is one of the world’s more agonizing adventures. To explain is okay, if there is something that needs explaining.”

With a rationale, the first, and especially the second, courses hold little appeal – and the third, to explain only when an explanation is required, feels like a failure of confidence, in both myself and in the intelligence of my audience.

As I say though, a true escape from this blight is unlikely – not least because the only outcome less appealing than having to do it myself is getting AI to do it for me. My rationale may lack a little heart, but at least I can honestly say it took an enormous effort to write.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

Knowing this has helped me a little in my copywriting life… but not as much as I’d have hoped.

I would say that, of all the moments that can haunt a copywriter, the one true horror is the addition of – or rather, the insistence upon – unnecessary words. Of all my good ideas that were ever ruined, I can’t think of a single one that was toppled by reduction. On the other hand, virtually all my greatest disappointments have come through the reckless addition of something that the brand didn’t need to say and the audience didn’t need to hear.

Many years ago I remember working on a digital banner that, while unlikely to be the first of its kind to dazzle the nation, did its job neatly and clearly. Yet we were forced to triple that banner’s length and add no fewer than an extra 40 words to its message. By the end, when the client was at last happy that everything that must be said was being said, it would have been quicker to have completed a full run down a hotel’s buffet-breakfast line than to sit through that rotating banner.

Another one. I remember putting together a ‘brand film’ that introduced this company to a world that most likely didn’t know who they were, and were only willing to spend the smallest degree of time and energy to find out. The name of the brief was ‘60 second brand film’ which, as acts of hubris go, is hard to top.

Naturally, the first version of the script sat comfortably below the minute mark – taking up as much time as you’d need to find an obscure item, say a pair of corn prongs, in a neatly arranged cutlery drawer.

By the time everyone with something to say had had their say (and had been careful to be seen saying it) the video was about the length of an experimental music video, or the hard boiling of an unusually stubborn egg. Again though, everyone was happy to see that they had ‘added something’ to the story, and were excited to know that, soon, our audience would know all there is to know about us. If anybody, outside the walls of the business, got more than halfway through that film then I will gladly stick the space bar on my keyboard up my nose and leave it there until the Brisbane Olympics.

I couldn’t tell you why people insist on adding more to a script or an idea that needs nothing more – except perhaps that, in certain organisations, there is a horror of being caught without ‘a build’. And, after all, anyone is capable of adding something in – the difficult part is always to know what to take away.

Whatever the reason, the dread of all that vain and vapid ‘more-ness’ is unlikely to be banished so simply as trifles like demon clowns or murderous ghost-nuns. Perhaps, then, our only true defence is to produce a version that contains no words at all.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

Stage 2: We have trained a dog to sniff your CV for signs of key skills and relevant experience. Please do not scent your CV with meat as this will confuse and enrage the dog.

Stage 3: Brian, who doesn’t even work here, will maintain unbroken eye contact with you for anything up to six days. If you blink, sleep, weep, or threaten to fight Brian, you are out.

Stage 4: A future version of you will travel back in time from further along in the process to pass on a grave warning. Refuse to listen to what they have to say, then push them into a dirty canal.

Stage 5: Write something to show that you are good. It must be long and deep and there must be a reference to ‘Speed 2: Cruise Control’ on every page. We are unable to reveal how we actually feel about ‘Speed 2: Cruise Control’ but can confirm that our feelings about it are ‘very strong’.

Stage 6: Kill one of our enemies. Not one of the easy ones (i.e. Brian).

Stage 7: A man carrying a goose will call for you at some point during the hours of darkness. You must compliment his goose in a very specific way. Anything other than the correct compliment will cause the goose to explode.

Stage 8: Gather up all of your badges, certificates and tokens of achievement and eat them all, repeating as you do the words: ‘PAST SUCCESS IS FUTURE WEAKNESS’.

Stage 9: Find the goose you complimented and persuade it to buy a simple pen.

Stage 10: Travel back in time to warn your past-self about all the goose stuff. Wear old clothes.

Stage 11: Brian (not that one) from HR will want to see samples of your work, professional references and, for no important reason, a document outlining your greatest fears. Please do not try and lie about your fears as we have trained a pig to sniff them for authenticity.

Stages 12-19: Face each of your greatest fears in a deadly obstacle course we have built in the woods. For example, if you have fears of confrontation and heights you will be forced to climb a huge tree in order to deliver awkward feedback to a colleague who cries easily.

Stage 20: Sign a document that promises to take the rap for any crimes anyone on the hiring committee has committed, or will commit, especially those related to our *very strong* feelings about ‘Speed 2: Cruise Control’.

Stage 21: Spend many years in prison. Do this quietly.

Stage 22: On your release, a car will be waiting to bring you to the office. Brian will be driving. The goose will be shouting directions at Brian in a way that will surely undermine his confidence and cause you to crash.

Stage 23: When you are released from the hospital (and have paid proper respects at the graves of the goose and, if you can be bothered, Brian) please make your way to the head office to collect your lanyard and starter pack.

Stage 24: Examine your lanyard closely. It should say something like ‘YOU DON’T WORK HERE. YOU’VE NEVER WORKED HERE. YOU KILLED OUR GOOSE (and Brian) YOU SON OF A BITCH.’ Strong men, supervised by the fear pig, will escort you from the property.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

The following is a gross oversimplification, but like all the best oversimplifications it requires a fair amount of complex reasoning to disprove. It goes a little like this: to acquire and encourage our creativity, we play. That sense of play is what makes us creatively interesting enough to become employable. Once we enter the ‘business’ world, albeit as creatives, we find less and less time, and reason, to play.

Now, I don’t have many ‘rules’ about what it takes to be a good copywriter – mostly because the few I have had do, in the end, always end up being proven useless in one way or another. But one that I do feel is yet to let me down is the belief that play – the frivolous indulgence of creative curiosity – is a mandatory aspect of this particular life.

Last night, for the first (ish), time I put these private ramblings into public practice, and delivered a 90-minute game-based workshop for CopyCon 25 simply called ‘Word Play’. I shan’t go on too much about it here (not least because, in all honesty, I hope to run it again for any agencies or businesses who would find it useful). All I will say is that the 15-or-so copywriters who joined me visibly filled with the mischief, and whimsy and pluck of untethered imagination.

The session was nothing grander or deeper than the permission to lark around with other writers who, themselves, would feed off your lark – a loop of reciprocal energy fuelled by our admiration for what creative minds can do on the spot, and the irresistible urge to join in, step up and show everyone what you’ve got.

As I was noodling around with the idea of the workshop, and the games within it, I came across a book by the theatre instructor Viola Spolin, called ‘Theatre Games for The Classroom’. In it, Spolin explains how ‘play’, in the form of games of the imagination, is not only a legitimate, but highly effective, way for creative people to unlock the most interesting parts of themselves. In this state of play, Spolin notes, it is the ‘unusual or extraordinary way’ of answering the challenge, rather than the compliant and predictable ways, that ‘are likely to be applauded by one’s fellow players’. Last night proved that to be the case with copywriters just as it is with board-treaders.

I was, of course, unsurprised by the wit and invention and enthusiasm of the writers who joined the session – if these silly writing games failed to awaken the imagination of fine professional writers then I’d surely squandered my time (and limited PowerPoint skills) in producing a dud. But what did surprise me was the growing sense that this sort of thing could be of some use, and provide some fun, to people who don’t do anything like the thing we do. Copywriters, and creative thinkers, aren’t the only ones who forgot what we learned, and are yet to learn, through simply mucking about.

Ironically, this renewed commitment to play is set to occupy, with any luck, at least a little of my working life for the foreseeable future. I’m lining up more workshops at different agencies and brands, sometimes with writers and creatives, sometimes with folk from very different worlds. (Would it be crass and self-serving to include anything in here about reaching out to me if this is something your place would be interested in? Yes, it definitely would.)

Approaching the 650-word mark, I’m sensing that reading this essay may be creeping out of the realm of ‘play’ and into something closer to ‘a slog’. But, as one final thought I’ll share a line from a superb book by the poet Mary Oliver called Rules For The Dance that, more than anything, encapsulates why I think this all matters to people who, like you and I, have nothing to rely on but our imagination:

“Solemnity is the littlest god there is. Purposeless, inert solemnity!

And fun, fountain of mirths, is often the cup of ease, surprise and good ideas.”

Your own fountain of mirths may have been neglected for too long. But, with a little of the right kind of frivolity, we can surely get it tinkling again.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

When I tell people who have never worked in copywriting, or in a small agency, about the times me and a few pals were ordered to stay behind in the office after the working day was done to churn out the materials for an upcoming pitch – never mind that these sessions would typically last until three or four in the morning – they assume I’m recounting a character-defining trauma (perhaps as an excuse for some, or many, of my own personal failings).

In fact, I am – perhaps perversely – sharing anecdotes from some of the fondest and most amusing experiences I’ve had in my copywriting life.

Yes, the hours were long and the pressure was high (it wasn’t uncommon, or inaccurate, to be told prior to a pitch that, should we fail to win we might as well lock up the shop and call it a day). Aside from a Pizza Express dinner and a bottomless supply of the disagreeable beers the agency bought cheaply by the van-load, it was nakedly exploitative and it wasn’t uncommon for a creative who’d finished work at 4am to be rolled back out (and expected to dazzle) for the pitch itself at 9.

Put like that, I can see how it may be a hard sell as my ‘happiest time’ in copywriting. And I’d be lying to myself more than I already am if I pretended there weren’t significant moments of sleepless, hopeless despair. But memory can be a fine friend, or maybe a calculating propogandist, and what I think about now when I think about those nights is just how much we laughed.

In our agency – a genuinely great place that scrapped hard to get by and yet frequently punched wildly above our slender weight – we had an approach to pitching that said more about our determination and industry than it did about our confidence. We over-delivered on pitches in a way I’ve never seen, or heard about, since – often going back with five or six routes, and visualising a mass of assets to ‘show how it all worked’. It was bad pitching, particularly when every one of those pitches was unpaid – which necessitated the delivery of the pitch-work to be just as unpaid, hence the night shift. But, it often did the job and I remember us winning a lot more than we lost – sometimes, I’ll admit, to the dismay of the studio who were already sick of a client we’d not yet won.

This ‘give it all you’ve got’ approach to pitching didn’t always work out however. I remember sitting in a pitch to retain, or regain, a long-standing client when the ‘marketing bit’ that precedes the creative overran so drastically that we were (quite rightly) cut off by the client when our allotted hour had expired, with less than a tenth of the good stuff having been shared. Too much, particularly when it comes to Powerpoint slides and process flow charts, is always more than enough.

But at the time ‘winning’ the pitch didn’t really make much of an impact on how we approached the work – even when the consequences of bungling it were spelled out to us. We’d chat, we’d crack jokes, we’d mooch about, we’d hurl missiles – in fact, were the pitch document to contain nothing but a video of us at work in these moments, we’d finish dead-last, even in those pitches where the number of agencies involved was enough to form a sizeable bowling league.

It was a very different kind of creativity – one where, yes, it had to be good but, more pressingly, it had to be done. I remember coming up with an entirely new idea, and a dozen or so headlines, on the spot at 2am, simply because we’d realised that one of our core ideas was actually a stinker. (Crucially, while the creative team were naturally willing to be significantly more pragmatic in this work – we were, after all, the ones making it – it was not uncommon for others in the agency to throw a moonlit spanner into some increasingly strained works.)

When I say it’s one of my happiest times in copywriting – and I suspect I may not have won you round to this precise point – it’s perhaps because it’s one of the most vivid. I remember certain, peculiar moments in the sharpest detail – like waiting behind the front door for a 4am taxi to arrive (we were, at least, allowed to ride home on the company dime) while late-night drunks vomited or fought, or fought until they vomited, a few feet from where we stood.

It has been many years since I’ve pitched late and one of my old pals, who’s still at the same agency we both worked at all those years ago, says that he too can’t remember the last time he worked nocturnally. I shan’t go as far as to say it’s sad to see the practice die out – if for no other reason than it makes me feel like small agencies are at last standing their ground more firmly with unpaid pitching. But I can’t deny a feeling of gratitude that I got to experience these curious, humorous, delirious times with some people I loved then and still love now.

Would I do it again if I was asked (or ordered)? You know, I think I might. Whether I’d make it as far as the Pizza Express supper, let alone the unseen vomit-fighters, is another matter entirely.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

Psychologically, I think it must be something to do with that sudden, desperate loss of stability, like a sailor clinging on to the beak of a killer squid just because their boat has capsized. I’d fill in the stupid forms and answer the stupid question and list out all my stupid GCSE results, all the while feeling like applying for any job – however unappealing – was better than an unconfronted state of joblessness.

It gave me a brief sense of purpose and, in all honesty, was a good way to break up a day that was otherwise devoted to watching all the Nicolas Cage films that have body parts in the title (Longlegs, Kick Ass, Willy’s Wonderland).

But what I hadn’t banked on was quite how much it would sting to get knocked back from those unwanted jobs. Often, I’d notice an email roll in from a company I couldn’t even remember applying to work at, and yet still feeling terribly disheartened to read the standard, soulless brush-off – the old HR trick of offering an insincere hug while simultaneously spitting in your pockets.

Getting turned down from a job you really want is painful in a different way. You can tell yourself that any job you really wanted is also wanted by a thousand other people, many of them brilliant, some of them in possession of an ‘in’ that you simply don’t have, a few of them sharing surnames and homes and basic gene structure with the CEO. But to be shunned by a shabby job is a like being a hitchhiker in one of those 1970s backwoods cannibal movies, and having ‘Stabface’ and his brother-wife sheepishly pretend not to see you as their windowless murder van drives on by.

Luckily, time and happy circumstances do what they always do and wash away a little of the grit from those moments, and I can see now that feeling bad about not getting a job I didn’t want wasn’t the stain on my ability it felt like at the time. It was, perhaps, a fair reward for how little I was prepared to give to the process beyond hitting that ‘Easy Apply’ button and lying about how much I enjoy being in the office.

I do believe that for creative roles, the ones we really want, the application itself is the first test of imagination – and in the same way that creative enthusiasm can be conveyed through something as sterile as a recruitment process, the absence of that enthusiasm is equally difficult to conceal.

I’m thankful that I never found myself in a position where my panicky post-redundancy freak-out could have led me into a stinker of a role, or at least an interview where I might easily have burst into tears. I’m perhaps more thankful that, when my current contract (at a place I’ve thoroughly enjoyed) runs out in a few months, I shan’t be so hasty – or so needy – when it comes to finding the next thing.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad

The idea is no good.

The idea is good in places but in other places it is the creative equivalent of chewing on a dishwasher tablet.

The idea was good and then I did bad things to it to make it better and now it’s worse.

The idea starts good, sags in the middle like a toad dangling from the handlebars of a stolen BMX, and finishes less good than it was.

The idea was never good but I needed an idea to be ready by now so I will pretend it’s good and argue ferociously and unwaveringly with anyone who points out how obviously not good it is.

The idea could be good if I wasn’t so obsessed with it being good enough.

The idea is good from certain angles. From other angles it stinks like a sock filled with the death of love.

The idea is good but you will only be able to see how good it is if I first provide you with 15 minutes of elaborate context.

The idea is relatively good compared to the ideas I had that were very, very bad.

The idea lost much of its goodness when you saw it and started asking stupid questions.

The idea is not actually that good but has the posture and confidence of a much better idea.

The idea is good enough to be picked by people who don’t especially know what a good idea is or why they might need one.

The idea is so good it could win a minor award where, instead of a trophy, you have to print out your own certificate at home.

The idea is beyond good and now I worry that I’ll never again have an idea capable of measuring up to it.

The idea is so good that I would prefer to save it for a more deserving client.

The idea was really good when I started talking about how good it was but the more I talk the less good it seems.

The idea seemed unusually good until I realised that I’d stolen it from a really very good idea I’d seen before.

The idea is good because it is mine in the same way that your idea is stupid and awful because it is not mine.

The idea is not necessarily good but everyone likes it and they seem willing to pay me.

The idea is no good but I need you to praise something about it or I’ll never think another thought again for the rest of my life.

The idea is good but also not good but also good enough but also good for nothing.

The idea is good because it came from my brain and even if it’s not as good as it could be, or as good as is needed in this moment, its very existence is something I should only ever feel good about.

The idea is fine.

Some copywriting books I’ve written:

Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter

Adele Writes an Ad